Eclipse Committer Emeritus

I received this very kind email in my inbox this morning.

"David Williams has expired your commit rights to the
eclipse.platform.releng project.  The reason for this change is:

We have all known this day would come, but it does not make it any easier.
It has taken me four years to accept that Kim is no longer helping us with
Eclipse. That is how large her impact was, both on myself and Eclipse as a
whole. And that is just the beginning of why I am designating her as
"Committer Emeritus". Without her, I humbly suggest that Eclipse would not
have gone very far. Git shows her active from 2003 to 2012 -- longer than
most! She is (still!) user number one on the build machine. (In Unix terms,
that is UID 500). The original admin, when "Eclipse" was just the Eclipse
Project.

She was not only dedicated to her job as a release engineer she was
passionate about doing all she could to make other committer's jobs easier
so they could focus on their code and specialties. She did (and still does)
know that release engineering is a field of its own; a specialized
profession (not something to "tack on" at the end) that just anyone can do)
 and good, committed release engineers are critical to the success of any
project.

For anyone reading this that did not know Kim, it is not too late: you can
follow her blog at

http://relengofthenerds.blogspot.com/

You will see that she is still passionate about release engineering and
influential in her field.

And, besides all that, she was (I assume still is :) a well-rounded, nice
person, that was easy to work with! (Well, except she likes running for
exercise. :)

Thanks, Kim, for all that you gave to Eclipse and my personal thanks for
all that you taught me over the years (and I mean before I even tried to
fill your shoes in the Platform).

We all appreciate your enormous contribution to the success of Eclipse and
happy to see your successes continuing.

To honor your contributions to the project, David Williams has nominated
you for Committer Emeritus status."


Thank you David! I really appreciate your kind words.  I learned so much working with everyone in the Eclipse community.  I had the intention to contribute to Eclipse when I left IBM but really felt that I have given all I had to give.  Few people have the chance to contribute to two fantastic open source communities during their career.  I'm lucky to have that opportunity.

My IBM friends made this neat Eclipse poster when I left.  The Mozilla dino displays my IRC handle.

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We're the face of open source

I had some interesting discussions on Twitter this afternoon.  

Wayne replied:

Miles said:

One of the great things about the Eclipse community: that we cooperate on open source projects yet compete on commercial products.  This slide from the Eclipse 10 years talk  that John Kellerman and I  recently gave shows the diversity of the CDT project by company.

Here's another slide where we talked about the fact that there weren't originally enough non-IBM committers on the Eclipse project.  I called this "Too much blue in the Eclipse rainbow".

Image ©darrentunnicliff, http://www.flickr.com/photos/darrentunnicliff/4510834607/  licensed under Creative Commons by-nc-sa 2.0

I'd like see a more diverse community at Eclipse and in open source in general.  To spread the word that it's a rewarding career and we have a wonderful community.  Also, I'd like to find more people to fix bugs :-)

Occupy Open Source: We are the 1%

I don't know if the percentage of women at Eclipse is really 1% but it's pretty low.*

Ian later tweeted

My response was that it would be interesting to focus on the person, where they had come from and what they work and work the technology into the discussion.  Show a picture of the person, what their educational background is, how they got involved in open source, and what they work on.  I think computer science and open source have an image problem.  People think that we software isn't a social endeavour.  And yet it is.  Hello GitHub.  That the work we do doesn't change the world and make people's lives better.  No again.

One of the ways to combat stereotypes tell stories from the perspective of the person. How they came to work in open source. The interesting projects they work on.  Talks they presented at conferences.  What they do in their spare time outside work. Curtis writes code for PDE but he also likes to kayak.  Susan works on Orion but also runs an organic farm.  Andrew writes Linux tools but he also has interesting travel adventures.  Eric works on the next generation Eclipse UI and wins pool tournaments.  Tom works on that too, and he likes to ski and hike near his home in Innsbruck.  Ian lives in Victoria, works on p2 and plays hockey.  Introduce the person, then move on to talk about the technology they work on :-)

Yesterday, Syzmon asked me if me if could use our Eclipse 10 Years talk at a demo camp in Poland. I thought that was fantastic.  Our talk delivered in another country, in a different language.  Go Creative Commons.

Putting these too ideas together, I thought it would be interesting to have a common slide deck we as a community could use at schools or universities called "We're the face of open source".  I think it's important to showcase the different paths people take to get to their careers.  And kids need to to see something of themselves reflected in people who work in the industry.  It doesn't matter if you're a man or woman, your ethnicity,  where you live, if you're gay or straight, have five kids or three dogs. The important thing is that you have a story that you want to share to inspire a new generation to consider contributing to open source. 

Thoughts?

Notes
*1)This is not intended to be a statement for or against the Occupy movement.  I'm just trying to be funny. YMMV.
2) Standing out in the Crowd talk from OSCON 2009 has interesting numbers about open source diversity and the benefits it brings
3) I'm willing to help put the slide deck together in my spare time outside work.  We could use a Google Docs to allow multiple people to edit it. Maybe the slide deck could provide a list of Eclipse mentors that are willing to help out students fix their first bug, browse the source tree etc.  These are details.  Let me know if you are interested in contributing :-) 
4) This would make an interesting EclipseCon talk. Ten Eclipse committers/contributors you should know and why

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Open source: She loves you, She loves you not

Working in an open source community is great, but there are also some disadvantages. From my admittedly narrow world view as a committer working in the Eclipse community as an employee of a large corporation, here are some of my observations.

Image ©emzee, http://www.flickr.com/photos/emzee/162362897/sizes/z/in/photostream/ licensed under Creative Commons by-nc-sa 2.0  



Things I love about working in open source

1. The people you meet are amazing and enthusiastic.   It's is a privilege to work with such a group of talented and thoughtful people.
2. Instead of non-disclosure agreements, we're free to talk about everything we work on.  Since everything is open, there are tremendous learning opportunities.  This inherent openness  means university researchers write papers about our work. Interesting!
3. Open source software is used by our consumers in unique ways.  When Jeff Norris gave his keynote at EclipseCon 2010 on how Eclipse was used to monitor robots on Mars, it was extraordinary to think that we as a community had contributed to something that was literally out of this world.  And when he said thanks to the committers during his talk, it was a very proud moment for us all.  There are many other examples of ways in which Eclipse is used to extend our knowledge of the world(s) around us.

Image ©owlbookdreams, http://www.flickr.com/photos/owlbookdreams/3721505610/ licensed under Creative Commons by-nc-sa 2.0  


Some things I don't love about working in open source

1. Many people complain but don't contribute. They consume the code we craft, complain about how its written, but are loathe to roll their sleeves up and write a useful patch.
2. We are constantly starved for resources, whether it be people, or new hardware.  There are too many bugs and not enough days :-)
3. My gender is an outlier in our community.

Ten years ago this week, I started working in at a small company called Object Technology International (OTI) as a system administrator.  I was asked by Jeff McAffer to install a server called dev.eclipse.org that would act as a CVS and bugzilla server for a project that they were going to open source called Eclipse.  I said something like "Open source, that's great.  Just like Linux".  To which Jeff replied along the lines of  "Well, I don't think it will be as popular as Linux, but we'll see what happens".  And the rest as they say, is history.

What do you love about working in open source?

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Smashing open source stereotypes

The Wall Street Journal published an article yesterday where it described the open-source software movement, whose activists tend to be fringe academics and ponytailed computer geeks. This is one of the many unfortunate stereotypes surrounding open source that I've heard over the years.   Let's break some of those down.


1.  Open source is a fringe movement.

Open source builds mainstream software. I work all day long contributing to open source software, as do many of my colleagues.  Why do corporations pay us to contribute to software that doesn't have a price tag?  It's in their self-interest to have employees improving the open source software that underlies their commercial offerings.  Here are some of the fringe groups involved in Eclipse.

Source: Eclipse Foundation Members' Meeting  Q4 Update December 16, 2010

These unknown companies are members of the Linux foundation.

2.  Open source is not professional.

At Eclipse, we ship our software on time every year.  We've done that for seven years.  That's professional.

 Source: Ian Skerrett: The Helios Train has arrived

3.  Open source contributors are loners sitting in their parents' basement working on arcane bugs.

Nope.  Open source is very social.  We interact on IRC and twitter.  We attend democamps, learn about new projects and build new businesses. We speak at conferences. The software we work on makes a difference in the world. It helps monitor robots on Mars, manages trains in Switzerland and models chemical reactions.

Source: Madhu Samuel: Eclipse Democamp Bangalore 2010

4.  Open source developers aren't in good physical condition and don't have interests outside of work

Again, a stereotype that has been proven wrong.    We ran 570K at EclipseCon 2010. 

Open source contributors run marathons, bike, curl, swim and play soccer or  hockey.  In fact, you can order an Eclipse bike shirt.

We also volunteer at schools and raise money for charity. 

5.  Open source contributors are always male.

Source: Miriam Ruiz: Women in Free Software

Wrong again. 

We may be a small minority, but here's hoping that these fine female role models will inspire a younger generation of women to consider the amazing career opportunities that open source has to offer.  Two generations ago, female doctors were rare.    Today, women are over 50% of new Canadian medical school graduates. So, may borrow a phrase from a recent campaign, it will get better.

What other open source stereotypes would you like to smash?

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